Welcome to This World

This is a welcome song, a shadow song, a broken song, a love song to self.

This is a space for all stories, the messy ones, the broken ones, the unremittingly heartbreaking ones.

This is a space for sitting in brokenness and knowing that some things can never fully be mended. Some things are never made right. Sometimes we have to stop trying to fix it, and start loving the broken pieces left behind.

I wrote this song after an intense session of Lifespan Integration with my therapist. We had discovered yet another layer of abuse in my early childhood, and as we sought to integrate that self-state (the Self that I was in my first year of life) he said to me, “You were innocent. All babies are innocent.”

And this didn’t ring true to me.

Yes, I was innocent in the sense that I was not to blame, that babies are not capable of doing wrong. But when I tuned into my self at that age, I perceived no sense of innocence in its other definition (naïveté, purity, lack of awareness of danger). Innocence requires an experience of safety. I was born into a family that was not safe, and when I tuned into myself as a baby, I saw that I was already well-aware of the dangers.

So I wrote this song to that baby, the welcome that I had never received.